Lemp Mansion

The Lemp Mansion is the house the brewing family left behind, and the most famous building in Benton Park. The William J. Lemp Brewing Company was one of the dominant American breweries before Prohibition – the firm behind Falstaff, and for a time a serious rival to Anheuser-Busch a few blocks away. The mansion stood at the centre of the family’s holdings, connected to the brewery caves beneath the neighbourhood.

What happened to the family afterwards is why most people have heard of the house. Prohibition destroyed the business, and three members of the Lemp family took their own lives inside these walls. The house has carried that reputation ever since; in 1980 Life magazine named it among the ten most haunted places in America, and the label has stuck.

Today the mansion works as a restaurant and inn. The dining rooms occupy the main floor, with lunch and dinner served among the original woodwork and fittings, and the Sunday chicken dinner has become an institution in its own right. Six suites upstairs take overnight guests, several of them in rooms with their own stories attached.

The house also trades openly on its ghosts, and does it with more wit than one might expect. Murder mystery dinner theatre runs through the year, ghost hunts and history tours are offered to those who want them, and Halloween is a season here rather than a night. Receptions, weddings and private events fill the rest of the calendar.

It is a short walk from Cherokee Street, and for anyone spending a day among the antique shops it makes an obvious evening: the building is worth seeing whether or not one believes a word of the hauntings, and the brewing history it belongs to is the history of this whole part of the city.